Can retail therapy really save the environment?
Becoming a green grocer, says Kath Stathers, is a voyage of discovery for supermarkets that presents shoppers with tough choices
Forty-three years. That’s how long the UK has to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% and stop London sinking underwater. Now, not before time, the race to become the nation’s greenest grocer is on. The Japanese retailer Muji, short for Mujirushi Ryohin (which means ‘no brand, good product’), has been famed for less-is-more packaging and its innovative, low-cost and sustainable product design – such as collapsible cardboard speakers, or toys, socks and T-shirts made from recycled yarn – since 1980, so the UK has some catching up to do.
The new green catchphrase is ‘triple bottom line’, meaning that financial, social and environmental concerns must all be equally balanced. Supermarkets have always been good at profits but mediocre about mitigating their effect on society and, historically, they’ve treated the environment as a tactical issue. If enough shoppers were outraged by pictures of dolphins dying in tuna nets – as happened in 1988 – stores would act. The slew of new initiatives suggests that the chains have either gone truly green, or are just reverting to type by utilising ecology for competitive advantage.
The hurricane that shocked Wal-Mart
The dramatic catalyst for this change was another city underwater: New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, the world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart (which owns Asda), was debating how it could become more environmentally friendly. H. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s chief executive officer, admits Katrina “shocked us from a learning process into aggressive action”.
Wal-Mart set itself three goals: to be supplied 100% by renewable energy, create zero waste and sell sustainable products. It brought the determination, economies of scale and aggressive discounting to sustainability that it used to earn its famous $20,000-a-minute profits. For example, Wal-Mart’s campaign to sell 100 million regular customers a cheap energy-efficient light bulb could save so much greenhouse gas it would be as good as taking 700,000 cars off the road.
Many environmentalists, wary of Wal-Mart’s reputation for paying bottom dollar to staff and suppliers, dismissed this approach as ‘greenwash’. Whatever the motivation, Wal-Mart’s lead persuaded Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and others to follow. With M&S aiming to become carbon neutral within five years – and Tesco trumpeting its £600m sustainability plan – the industry has pledged itself to revolutionary change.
Air freight generates 11% of the food industry’s emissions from transport. As a million Africans depend on selling fruit and veg to British shoppers, sourcing all our food locally might be socially disastrous
To design a sustainable supermarket business will take audacity, subtlety, rigour, deep pockets and luck. Consider a simple mainstay product like beef. We eat so much meat that 75% of the UK’s agricultural land is devoted to livestock. That land is often fertilised (which can, when decaying, generate nasty N2O emissions, 300 times more powerful than CO2) and the cows will eat grain (70% of which is imported) while the plants that ferment in their stomachs cause them to release methane, 23 times more powerful than CO2.
The beef will be processed (every pound processed is equivalent to burning three pounds of carbon), packaged and invariably packed into a lorry – which will use two-and-a-half to 10 times as much energy to carry a kilo of food as a train – to a supermarket that burns up electricity to keep it cool. The carbon emissions from our shopping trips to the supermarket are, DEFRA estimates, about the same as the food transport industry’s. Back home, the beef might be stored in a fridge or freezer – hopefully an energy-saving one, though we are recklessly buying bigger freezers and second fridges. If the weather’s kind, we might barbecue the beef : Britain’s barbies emit as much CO2 in a year as the nation’s cars do in a month. Then we have to get rid of the waste. British households bin a tonne of food every 10 minutes and throw away the weight of 265 jumbo jets in packaging every week.
In essence, the challenge for supermarkets boils down to four areas:
- The products they sell;
- How they deliver those products;
- How those products are packaged;
- How the stores that sell those products are run.
The stuff on the shelves
Selling us different things is the most visible way supermarkets can become more sustainable. Retailers routinely ‘choice edit’, taking unsustainable choices off the shelves. Various chains no longer sell endangered fish like skate, M&S sells only Fairtrade coffee and tea, and many stores will soon take eggs from caged hens off their shelves. From May, Sainsbury’s own-brand kitchen rolls, loo papers and tissues will be made from sustainable wood fibre while, from 2008, the Co-op won’t stock the old-style incandescent light bulbs.
Campaigners want supermarkets to go further, selling more organic produce and reducing food miles. To shoppers, these both seem like the green thing to do. But neither issue is as clear cut as it might seem.
The laws of cause and effect, when applied to food production and delivery, often work in strange ways. In America, farmers can’t grow enough organic food to meet demand, so ‘green’ consumers are, ironically, forcing the industry to clock up more food miles. And switching entirely to organic farming isn’t simple – for farmers or for shoppers. French campaigner Jean-Mar Jancovi says France cannot switch en masse to organic farming (which he estimates would generate 30% less emissions than conventional farming but crucially yields 50% less product per unit of area) unless it eats 33-50% less meat and releases some scarce land for organic produce. This issue has barely surfaced in public debate.
The ridiculously complicated matter of food miles
As it takes 11 school runs to emit as much carbon as it takes to air freight a punnet of strawberries, out of season, to a British supermarket, it’s tempting to conclude that the key to sustainability lies in reducing food miles. There are plans to put air freight stickers on produce so shoppers can make a choice. But will it be an informed choice?
Sainsbury’s environmental audit of its Fairtrade roses from Kenya revealed that their carbon footprint was 4.5 times lower than roses grown in Holland. In Kenya, the sun – not fossil fuels – grew the flowers. The Kenyan yield of roses was nearly twice as much as Holland’s and the densely packed boxes in which the Kenyan roses were flown to the UK were more efficient to transport.
Increasing local food supply is no panacea either. British academic Tim Lang, a vocal critic of the food industry, estimates that if all food was supplied from within a 12-mile radius of London, it would save £2bn in environmental costs. Yet Rowland Hill, corporate social responsibility manager at M&S, insists: “In carbon terms, the argument for local supply is very weak.” The industry says local supply might replace streamlined, efficient distribution systems from large suppliers, with less efficient systems and many small suppliers.
Food miles figures are so seductively simple they hog a lot of headlines. But air freight only generates 11% of the food industry’s emissions from transport. And, as the charity Action Aid has pointed out, a million Africans depend on selling fruit and vegetables to British shoppers. So sourcing all our food on our doorstep might, globally, be socially disastrous.
The stronger argument for local food supply – and urban food farms – is that they will force us, as consumers, to face the consequences of the choices we make. When we were a race of hunter/farmer/gatherers, the consequences of our food choices were immediate, visible and undeniable. Not any more.
We have seen a step change in supermarkets’ commitment to sustainability. They’re five years behind other corporates but their commitments go beyond the targets set out by the government
How far food travels is one part of the complex equation of sustainability, the other is how it covers the miles. Boats and trains are much greener than lorries and planes but Asda, which wants to put more freight on rail, says it can’t use many routes until the lines improve. Retailers are exploring green alternatives to the articulated lorry. Sainsbury’s is considering gas-powered trucks while Tesco’s new Shrewsbury store will use electric home-delivery vans, saving 100 tonnes of CO2 a year . It’s a start, if hardly revolutionary.
Online shopping, with one van delivering to many houses, is more sustainable than the weekly rush to the superstore. In America, Austin and Miami have set up specific grocery bus services while in Los Angeles one supermarket, Numero Uno, runs its own free shuttle bus. There is, though, one catch: you have to spend at least £15 to get a free ride.
A new mindset for packaging
Excessive packaging is much maligned, but it does stop food going to waste: in China, 20% of food is wasted before it reaches the shops, compared to 1.5% in the UK. But grocery packaging accounts for a quarter of household waste so supermarkets are taking action. Wal-Mart boss Scott says: “It does not need a big investment to reduce packaging, just a different mindset.” Using less packaging on its own-label toys saved the chain 3,425 tonnes of corrugated materials, 1,358 barrels of oil, 5,190 trees and £1.7m in transport costs in a year.
Design can help the industry make informed choices. It is not, American packaging designer Wendy Jedlicka says, as easy as compiling a list of green materials packaging can be made from. “You need a programme so businesses can really figure out what materials are eco for their applications – there’s no point in specifying a ‘green’ plastic if there’s no mechanism for collecting it.”
Design can encourage recycling. Norwegian company Tomra has launched a high-tech ‘reverse vending machine’ in supermarkets, which identifies and sorts empty beverage packaging and gives customers money-off vouchers. This makes social and environmental sense and, as shoppers who return empties spend 52% more than other consumers, gives the store a competitive edge.
The green store wars
You’ve probably never heard of Ken Carter. As Tesco’s energy manager, he is a regular on the conference circuit with a presentation that is more substantive than its closing line – “Every little helps” – suggests.
Carter has a simple target: help Tesco use half as much energy per square foot by 2010 as it did in 2000. To reach that, he says, the chain will need a mixture of small, easy decisions (using cold-air retrieval, turning lights off at night), bigger projects (new green stores, a straw-fired power station, cutting food waste) and a £100m investment in such sustainable energies as wind, tides, LED technology and biomass (generating electricity from garbage).
Tesco’s greenest store opened its doors last November in Wick, in the Scottish highlands. The store has wind turbines, solar power, rainwater harvesting and energy-efficient refrigeration units. Its timber frame is all sustainably sourced and produce is delivered at the local harbour. Just the fact that the ceiling is a metre lower has, Carter says, made a massive difference to the volume of air that has to be heated or cooled. Wick’s carbon footprint should be half as large as a regular store’s and some of the thinking could make existing stores greener. The other chains are, to varying degrees, pioneering similar stores, though oddly Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda’s energy-saving ideas seem, so far, not to extend much beyond encouraging us to wash our clothes at 30˚C.
Will all this make a difference? “We’ve seen a step change in supermarkets’ commitment to sustainability,” says Dr Sally Uren, director of the business programme at the charity Forum for the Future. “They’re five years behind other corporates but they’re tackling the critical areas and their commitments go beyond the targets set out in the government’s food industry sustainability strategy. And Tesco’s don’t often say things that they don’t do.” And Wal-Mart’s incredibly detailed green scorecard for its 60,000 suppliers could, if used properly, trigger enormous change in corporate behaviour.
Retailers will embark on this complex adventure assuming that becoming green grocers will keep them firmly in the black. But a truly sustainable system will ask awkward questions of retailers and shoppers. If, as the eco-warriors’ saying goes, the most sustainable product is the one you didn’t buy, where does that leave the industry? As consumers, we like to have it all: choice, year-round supply, quality and price. If the cost of saving the world is not having strawberries out of season, we might pay it. But we each typically consume 60% more meat than we did 40 years ago. If saving the planet required us to only eat as much meat as we did in the 1960s, would we? If every nation on earth consumed as many resources as the UK we’d need three planets to support us, not one. Only the chronically optimistic think that gap can be closed without changing our shopping habits.
Five ways managers can make companies more sustainable
- Make better use of resources
If quantities of energy, material and waste can be measured, they can be reduced. One simple tweak to its bottles of water reduced Wal-Mart’s plastic usage by 9.6 million pounds.
- Redesign for sustainability
Design could make your offices, retail outlets and products more sustainable. In 2008 Wal-Mart will launch stores that use 30% less energy and emit 30% less carbon than existing outlets. Product redesign can be key, as M&S’s plan to make clothing using plastic bottles shows. Simple steps include designing lighter, more biodegradable packaging or designing sustainable materials in the product.
- Run a green transport policy
Use more economical fuels, such as diesel or, better still, bio-diesel or methane. Plan routes to ensure your lorries aren’t empty on return trips. Use trains to carry goods more often and for business travel. A full environmental audit of your vehicles could save significant amounts of fuel and money. Wal–Mart has even gone so far as to redesign the axles, tyres, sides and cabins of its lorries.
- Raise awareness
Involving suppliers, customers and even rivals can change behaviour and inspire sustainable solutions.
- Be consistent
Tesco was slammed for talking green in the UK while selling live turtles and frogs in its new store in Beijing. Climate change is a global issue and companies face global scrutiny.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007